Careers, Dissemination

In a nutshell: how to write a lay summary

From Elsevier Connect

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Lay SummaryYou must be rather pleased with that newly-published article. After many long months, your hard work has paid off and that paper has now taken its place in the library of academic literature. Unfortunately, so have another 2.5 million articles just this year. How do you stand out amongst that enormous crowd and get attention? One way of doing this is to make your article as accessible as possible and a good way of achieving that aim is to prepare a lay summary.

Here are some pointers on how to write a useful lay summary.

Lay summaries can be a powerful tool to extend and broaden the impact of your research. Don’t forget that there are a number of other tools available to you as author – check out the Elsevier guide to “getting noticed”, for example. Have a go at writing a summary for your next article (or a blog for Dementia Researcher) and ask your editor if the journal in question is interested in participating in the lay summaries project. Enjoy making a splash with your next article!

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